Louisville basketball stats fans should know entering Year 2 of Pat Kelsey era

Pat Kelsey started sounding like a broken record around the two-month mark of Louisville basketball's 2024-25 campaign.

What was the secret behind the Cardinals' 19-1 finish to the regular season? Defense, defense, defense.

"There's a movement going on with our team from a defensive perspective; and it starts in the minds and hearts of each guy in a Louisville jersey," the coach said after a Jan. 28 win over Wake Forest at the KFC Yum! Center. "Getting stops matters; taking care of (your) assignment matters; picking up for a mistake of your teammate matters."

The numbers back him up. With ACC Defensive Player of the Year Chucky Hepburn leading the way, U of L finished Year 1 of Kelsey's tenure ranked 25th on KenPom.com in adjusted defensive efficiency — allowing 96.3 points per 100 possessions. Prior to 2024-25, the coach never had a team crack the top 65 across his three seasons at Charleston and his nine seasons at Winthrop.

"You've got to have a good IQ defensively; but you've also got to have some size and some mobility and some length," said Brian Kloman, whom Kelsey recently promoted from defensive coordinator to a GM-like role, during an interview with The Courier Journal last summer. "Those (traits) have always been hard to combine at the levels we've been at."

Whether Louisville can match or improve upon its 2024-25 defense will loom large in determining whether it can make good on the sky-high expectations it's garnering for 2025-26. Here are five more stats every fan should know before Year 2 of the Kelsey era tips off:

14,622

Louisville's 12 active scholarship players have totaled 14,622 minutes at the Division I level entering the 2025-26 season. That's 5,367 fewer than Kelsey's Year 1 roster (19,989) — the program's most experienced team since it began tracking the stat full time in 1977 — but still good enough to take the No. 2 spot on the list.

Moving down to No. 3 is the late Denny Crum's 1981-82 team (13,298), which went 23-10 and lost to Georgetown in the Final Four. Only five of the program's teams dating back to 1977 have entered a season with more than 12,000 minutes at the DI level under their belts. The other two were Chris Mack's 2018-19 team (12,717) and Rick Pitino's 2008-09 team (12,559).

J'Vonne Hadley leads the Cards with 3,139 DI minutes played to this point. Ryan Conwell (2,968), Isaac McKneely (2,877), Aly Khalifa (2,285) and Adrian Wooley (1,109) round out the top five. Kasean Pryor (1,054), who logged just 161 last season before tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee, is the only other player on the roster who has exceeded 1,000.

There are some noteworthy outliers. International big men Sananda Fru and Evangelos Zougris have spent the past four seasons playing in top-flight professional leagues in Germany and Greece, respectively. Kobe Rodgers, who redshirted in 2024-25 to recover from a knee injury, totaled 1,192 minutes across two seasons at DII powerhouse Nova Southeastern before transferring to Charleston and playing 673 during the 2023-24 campaign.

0.7172

That's the expected strength of Louisville's 2025-26 schedule on BartTorvik.com, which considers Kelsey's Year 2 slate the most difficult in the ACC and the 27th toughest in the country. Alabama is No. 1 at 0.8111.

The expected strength of the Cards' nonconference schedule (0.5961) ranks first in the ACC and 17th overall. Only seven high-major programs face tougher sledding: the Crimson Tide, Michigan, Kansas, Auburn, Purdue, Villanova and Marquette.

Seven of U of L's 13 nonconference foes cracked the top 75 of Torvik's preseason rankings: Arkansas (16), Baylor (34), Cincinnati (32), Indiana (42), Kentucky (14), Memphis (73) and Tennessee (13). Three of those programs, the Razorbacks, the Wildcats and the Volunteers, advanced to the Sweet 16 or further in last season's NCAA Tournament.

Torvik has Louisville at No. 11 in his preseason rankings — second in the ACC behind No. 2 Duke, the reigning conference champion. The Cards play the Blue Devils twice during the regular season: Jan. 6 at the Yum! Center and Jan. 26 at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

80

Six of Louisville's 13 scholarship players combined for 80 injury-related absences across 35 games in 2024-25, and that's before taking Khalifa and Rodgers redshirting into account.

That can't happen again if the Cards are to take the next step in Year 2 under Kelsey.

Per advanced analytics guru Evan Miyakawa, the brains behind EvanMiya.com, only two programs that finished 2024-25 in the top 100 of his website's rankings lost more production due to injuries than U of L: Georgia Tech and West Virginia. Neither made the NCAA Tournament.

Only two of the Cards' five holdovers from last season appeared in every game: Hadley and Khani Rooths.

69.1

Due to the aforementioned rash of injuries, Louisville played at a tempo of 69.1 possessions per 40 minutes in 2024-25, according to KenPom. It was the fourth-slowest pace of Kelsey's head-coaching career and marked the first time since 2014-15 that one of his teams averaged fewer than 70 possessions per 40 minutes.

Between 2015-16 and 2023-24, Kelsey's teams ranked no worse than 51st nationally in tempo. His first Charleston team finished second in 2021-22 with a pace of 73.5 possessions per 40 minutes.

If the Cards can stay healthy in 2025-26, expect Kelsey to utilize a deep rotation while they fly up and down the court. During the coach's winningest season to date, a 31-4 run at Charleston in 2022-23, the Cougars ranked 29th in tempo (70.8) and had nine players with minute shares of 37.8% or higher.

47.8%

Of Louisville's 2,088 attempted field goals last season, 47.8% of them came from 3-point range. Per KenPom, only 20 DI teams fired away from beyond the arc more frequently.

There was just one problem: The Cards posted the second-worst conversion rate of Kelsey's head-coaching career (32.8%) and had only one player average two or more made 3s per game.

It's not a stretch to say U of L will be even more trigger happy and efficient in 2025-26 despite losing 277 of its 328 makes and 816 of its program-record 999 attempts from Year 1 of the Kelsey era to graduation. That's because the trio of guards it added from the NCAA transfer portal (Conwell, McKneely and Wooley) combined to hit 273 on 653 attempts (41.8%) in 2024-25.

In addition to Conwell, McKneely and Wooley, three other Cards are shooting 35% or better from deep for their collegiate careers: Hadley, Khalifa and Rodgers. Then, there's five-star freshman Mikel Brown Jr., who knocked down 20 of his 42 attempted 3s (47.6%) during USA Basketball's seven-game run to gold at the FIBA U19 World Cup this summer.

Reach Louisville men's basketball reporter Brooks Holton at [email protected] and follow him on X at @brooksHolton.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Key stats for Pat Kelsey's Louisville basketball team in 2025-26